Chicago, the City of Broad Shoulders, is the home of Libido Films, a company that favors a gender-equal approach to erotic movies. Does this mean they don’t engage in the exclusionary and demeaning practice common to California’s porn industry of paying female performers twice as much as male performers? That would be good. Does this mean the male talent do just as much gaping? That would be bad.
Jack Hafferkamp and Marianna Beck started the quarterly LIBIDO: The Journal of Sex And Sensibility, in 1988, and over its decade-long run its founders realized that the contemplation of someone’s privates is best accomplished without a book in one’s hand. That is why they started Libido Films, and have produced arty, filmic, couples-friendly porn for the past eight years. Couples-Friendly=No Gaping by Anyone.
Read more after the gap.
What is interesting (to me, anyway, who subsists on a diet of highly processed porn) is how natural people look, and by natural I mean everything from older, shorter, flabbier, more exotic, less affected, and more compelling than the folks who are in porn down here. Still, I’m amazed that the paths don’t cross.
“We are in Chicago, where people are naturally beefier,” Jack Hafferkamp told me. “We find our talent through word-of-mouth referrals; people we know send us to other
people.”
Libido Films.com is a pay site that features retouched antique porn from a variety of sources, as well as the company’s original productions.
I call this photo “When Batman’s Away.”
“Our biggest seller is the feature Urban Friction.” Hafferkamp said. “Historically –because it still sells — it is Ecstatic Moments. Stories of Oh! Part One has done well, too.”
That’s all well and sex positive and good, but my interest was sparked by Orgasmi: The Faces of Ecstasy, a collection of orgasm faces made by 22 SF Bay Area residents. Shot from the neck up, the film seems like a great aid for novice porn stars.
I noticed that in Libido Films’ previews that there were very few blondes; that is probably why Chicago native Hillary Scott had to move here.
I applaud any effort that adds a coast (in this case, Lake Michigan) to porn’s beachheads in America. Only Massachusetts’ Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg remains unconquered.
Previously: Postcard from Porn Week; Pornfidelity 8; Digital Playground’s Cavalcade of Synonyms
See also: Libido Films
Actually Chicago is known as “The City of the Big Shoulders,” because of a poem about Chicago by Carl Sandburg cleverly titled “Chicago.”
Other names which could have been taken from Sandburg’s poem include “The City of the Hog Butchers,” “The Bareheaded, Shoveling City,” and my personal nickname for this Midwestern metropolis, “The City for Player’s with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handlers.” Sadly my cocktail napkins embossed with that nickname never caught on with the locals …bastards.
Okay, I made up the bit with the napkins, however I am truly saddened that I knew it was “Big” and not “Broad.” For this, I apologize.
Yeah, I know that Sandburg dude. We partied while he was writing his Lincoln biographies. But who’s to say that I, Gram, didn’t call Chicago the City of Broad Shoulders? You yourself chose to call it something different than Sandburg did. Remember that I am America’s Beloved Porn Journalist and if I want to call Chicago the Bindhi City for it burgeoning Hindu population or or San Francisco/Oakland The Gay Area or New York The City that Never Fweeps due to its alarming rate of vagina dentata then I have every right to.
Your logic and rationality, and of course, the power of that most sought after title of ABPJ, had me weeping in shame while rending garments and doing all sorts of gnashings. I was all set to throw myself upon your mercy for daring to even consider the thought of possibly questioning your esteemed choice of city nickname.
Then we hit the puns.
Bindhi City I grant you, that’s clever. The one for NYC, well maybe, and then The Gay Area…
Hmmmm.
Oscar Wilde once said, “Immanuel doesn’t pun; he Kant.” Awful, truly awful. Recall that he got two years of hard labor. The only thing that saved him from a life sentence was that he wasn’t also a mime.
How dare you insult mimes not a week after Marcel Marceau’s death. Porn is a tough business.
Note to self: Mime Porn.